Could the Chiefs go 17-0? Are they really the NFL’s best team? Barnwell answers big questions about their start
Credit to Author: Bill Barnwell| Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2024 11:10:44 EST
Stephen A. Smith explains why he believes the Chiefs will take their first loss of the season against the Bills. (1:31)
Less than 3%. ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) thinks there’s a 2.7% chance the 9-0 Chiefs win their remaining eight games and become the first team in NFL history to win 17 games in a regular season. If they can win this weekend’s rivalry game against the Bills, they will be favored in each of their seven remaining contests. Their chances of going 17-0 would more than double.
After this past Sunday’s game, some people might feel like the Chiefs’ chances of pulling this off are closer to 100%. Late in a close game against the Broncos, Kansas City seemed to have finally met its match. Patrick Mahomes missed an open Travis Kelce in the end zone, with the Chiefs instead kicking a field goal to go up two points. The Broncos then converted three third downs to get in range of a chip-shot field goal, only for Leo Chenal to come up with a perfect-season-saving block of Wil Lutz‘s kick. Kansas City won 16-14. Its victories have felt preordained.
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And yet, people taking a closer look might feel like the Chiefs’ chances are much closer to 0%. They have won exactly one game by more than 10 points. They’ve gotten help from oversized feet (Isaiah Likely‘s non-catch at the end of Week 1 against the Ravens), well-timed calls (a fourth-and-16 pass interference late in Week 2 against the Bengals), scaredy-cat coaches (Todd Bowles not going for two as a significant underdog with 27 seconds left to go in regulation in Week 8 against the Bucs) and now a game-saving blocked field goal on the final snap of regulation.
Who’s right? Can the Chiefs really do this? While most everyone acknowledges this is a good football team, are they pretenders in relation to the other teams that started their seasons 9-0? Are they worse than other Kansas City teams from the past? Can they keep up this cycle? And what does it mean for their chances of becoming the first team in NFL history to three-peat? Let’s look into the undefeated Chiefs and try to figure out whether they can keep it up the rest of the way:
Jump to a section:
How the Chiefs have gotten here
Is their start actually sustainable?
Are they the worst 9-0 team … ever?
What has sunk previous unbeaten teams?
Will the Chiefs improve and go 17-0?
Before the season, I predicted that the Chiefs were one of the most likely teams to improve on their regular-season record from 2023, when they went 11-6. And then, on my preseason podcast with colleagues Domonique Foxworth and Mina Kimes, I went a step further and suggested they would be the second team in NFL history to win 16 games in the regular season, joining the 2007 Patriots, who went 16-0.
On the surface, I should be thrilled about this prediction. The Chiefs are the last undefeated team and are more than halfway to that 16-win prediction. If the rest of the season played out as chalk, ESPN’s FPI projects them to win 16 games, losing Sunday’s game against Buffalo. Given that I also predicted the Jaguars would win the AFC South, I should feel good about this one, right?
I don’t, because the reasons why I expected the Chiefs to win 16 games have not come true. The arguments I had in favor of their spectacular season haven’t panned out. Let’s review what I thought would happen and what has occurred instead:
An improved turnover differential. The Chiefs had a minus-11 turnover differential last season, a shockingly bad number for a team with Mahomes at quarterback and an opportunistic defense. They lost the turnover battle about five times per season between 2018 and 2022, only to do so nine times during the regular season in 2023. They went 4-5 in those games and 7-1 otherwise.
Turnover differential typically regresses toward the mean, which is one of the reasons I had the Commanders as a team likely to improve this season. The Chiefs, though, have continued to turn the ball over. Week 10 was the first time all season they haven’t turned the ball over in a game. They have a minus-four turnover differential overall, which is tied with the Jets and Patriots for 22nd in the league.
The positive, if there is one, is that they’ve only lost the turnover battle three times in nine games. Unsurprisingly, those games have been tight: They include a one-point win over the Bengals, a seven-point victory over the Chargers where they didn’t take the lead until there were six minutes to go, and a six-point overtime win over the Buccaneers. Andy Reid’s team has somehow only won the turnover battle once this season, and it was arguably its most impressive win, a 10-point victory in the Super Bowl LVIII rematch over the 49ers.
Their fumble recovery rate. The 2023 Chiefs recovered 41.9% of their fumbles last season, a rate that was unluckily low. History tells us fumble recovery rates almost always regress toward 50% from year to year. As an example, if we just take the 90 teams from 1991 through 2022 that recovered between 40% and 43% of their fumbles and see what they did the following season, their recovery rate the following season was 49.9699%. That’s about as close to 50% as it gets.
The 2024 Chiefs, somehow, have been even worse at falling on footballs. They’ve recovered five of the 16 fumbles that have hit the ground in their games, good for a 31.3% recovery rate. Only the Saints (30%) and Raiders (an unfathomably brutal 13.3%) have recovered a lower percentage of fumbles this season. Kansas City was over 50% in 2022 and 2021.
The deep passing attack. Once the league’s most devastating deep passer, the departure of Tyreek Hill and the shift toward two-high coverages — which hit the Chiefs before spreading across the rest of the league — took away so much of the downfield passing attack that made Mahomes an instant sensation. In 2023, though, his 52.3 QBR on deep throws ranked only 27th in the league, as he completed 28.3% of his deep-pass attempts while throwing one touchdown passes against five picks. After hitting 2.3 deep passes per game in 2018, Mahomes was down to averaging one per game in 2023.
This season, Mahomes has only six deep completions in nine games. Every other full-time starter in the league has more. His 77.6 QBR on those throws bumps him up to 21st, but he still has three picks on 19 throws.
Stephen A. Smith and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo disagree on whether there is cause for concern over the Chiefs’ close wins.
Part of the reason why I was optimistic about the downfield-passing game improving was improvements in personnel. The Chiefs were expecting a full season out of second-year wideout Rashee Rice, used a first-round pick on Xavier Worthy and had signed Marquise Brown away from the Cardinals. Brown then suffered what appears to be a season-ending shoulder injury during the preseason, while Rice went down with a knee injury early in Week 4. Worthy hasn’t been able to consistently convert his speed into downfield opportunities.
General manager Brett Veach subsequently traded for DeAndre Hopkins, who had a spectacular deep contested catch against the Titans. That was the first and only deep completion Mahomes has had since Week 4, however. While the drop rate for Kansas City’s wide receivers has declined from a staggering 7.8% to 3.6% this season (about league average), they don’t have the sort of wide receiver talent I was hoping to see propel Mahomes back to his prior glories as a deep passer.
An elite defense. While the Chiefs had traded star cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Titans to ease their cap concerns, they were still returning most of the starters one of the league’s youngest defenses. They finished seventh in QBR allowed and fifth in expected points added (EPA) allowed per play a year ago, and my hope was that breakout seasons from defensive linemen George Karlaftis and Felix Anudike-Uzomah might propel the unit even further forward.
Karlaftis has been excellent and the Chiefs still have a very good defense, but they’ve taken a small step backward. Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s unit ranks 13th in QBR allowed and 11th in EPA per play. Kansas City ranks fifth in points allowed, but that’s a product of facing just 87 drives this season, six fewer than any other team. It is 11th in points allowed per possession. Again, while still among the league’s better defenses, it hasn’t been quite as dominant.
So, if most of the arguments for how the Chiefs were going to improve haven’t played out as expected, how have they done this?
They’ve won a remarkably high percentage of their close games. They are 7-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer, and as I mentioned earlier, most of those games have come down to a drive or even one play going Kansas City’s way. The only other team in league history to start the season with seven one-score wins and no losses in its first nine games was the 2006 Colts. That Indianapolis team promptly lost 21-14 to the Cowboys in its 10th game of the season, but things ended up just fine for Peyton Manning & Co., as they finished the year by beating the Bears in Super Bowl XLI.
The Chiefs’ offense has been spectacular at exactly the right time. On first and second down, they are generating minus-0.02 EPA per play, which ranks 18th in the league. They’re roughly about as good as the Chargers and Steelers on early downs — not exactly who we think of when we consider great offenses.
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On third and fourth down? You can probably guess what happens. The Chiefs are averaging 0.41 EPA per play, which is the league’s best mark. The Commanders are the only team close to what Kansas City is doing on those money downs. Through 10 weeks, this is the fourth-best performance we’ve seen from any team on third and fourth downs in a single season over the past decade.
The Chiefs are converting on a league-high 54.5% of their third- and fourth-down opportunities. The second-placed Bucs are the only other team over 50%. While they haven’t been great on first and second down, they’re rarely producing negative plays such as sacks, which makes their life easier; their average third down comes with just 6.3 yards to go. Only the Cardinals have faced shorter third downs. The offense has gone 8-for-8 on fourth downs, as the only failure on a fourth-down try came on a fake punt.
On special teams, the Chiefs have had a significant advantage in the kicking game. Harrison Butker has been excellent, going 18-of-20 on field goals and 22-of-23 on extra points. His only misses on field goal attempts have been from 51 and 65 yards out.
When opposing kickers have tried to make kicks against Kansas City, it hasn’t gone as well. Those kickers have hit just 76.5% of their field goal tries, the fifth-worst rate in the league, and 82.4% of their extra points, the lowest rate for any team. In all, kickers have hit on 79.4% of their attempts against the Chiefs this season. Only the Chargers have enjoyed better luck on opposing kicking attempts. The Chenal block was obviously a product of skill, but it was the only block the Chiefs have in 2024.
The third- and fourth-down numbers are an obvious red flag. Teams don’t typically have an ability to raise their game on those downs after struggling on first and second down. There are teams better in certain situations given their personnel, but there’s no reason why an offense would only start trying to succeed on third down when it could instead move the chains on first or second down.
The Chiefs might break our rules. Through the Week 10 mark of each season over the past decade, the best third-and fourth-down offense was the 2022 Chiefs. The 2024 Chiefs rank fourth. The 2020 Chiefs were ninth. The 2018 Chiefs were 10th. And the 2021 Chiefs were 13th. That 2021 team was similar to this season’s Chiefs, as they had an average offense on early downs and were a juggernaut on third and fourth downs:
That 2021 team got better on early downs. After Week 10, it was the league’s second-best offense on first and second downs, and it matched that mark on third and fourth downs. Teams typically see their performance on third and fourth down regress toward what they’ve done on first and second down, since there’s a far bigger sample in the latter category, but it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the Chiefs to improve on early downs over the rest of the season.
I would argue that a Mahomes-led offense ranking below league average in anything is an outlier. The pending return of Isiah Pacheco should help a rushing attack that is handing an average of more than 22 carries per game over the past five weeks to Kareem Hunt, who hasn’t topped 4.0 yards per rush in any of those contests. Hunt is averaging more touches per game (24.6) than any player in football since he entered the starting lineup in Week 5, a stunning statistic for a guy who was out of football to begin the season and really hasn’t been very good in that role since taking over.
The Chiefs also can’t rely on opponents to miss kicks all season. Even beyond the block at the end of the game, those misses have mattered. Justin Tucker missed a 53-yarder just before halftime in Week 1 that might have produced an entirely different endgame sequence for the Ravens in the fourth quarter. Lutz had a 60-yarder come up short to end the first half on Sunday. Evan McPherson missed an extra point in a game the Bengals eventually lost by a single point.
With that being said, there are ways this team can get luckier from here on out. They’ll recover a higher percentage of the fumbles that hit the ground in their games. Mahomes won’t throw as many tipped interceptions as he has so far. They’ve played the eighth-toughest schedule this season, but ESPN’s FPI believes they’ll face the fifth-easiest slate from here on out. Only the Cardinals, Colts, Falcons and Bucs have easier opponents ahead of them.
The Chiefs’ underlying level of play could also improve. Swapping out replacement-level efficiency from Hunt for an above-average back in Pacheco would be a major upgrade. Hopkins’ role in the offense should grow as he gets more familiar with the playbook. The early-down offense should get better. They are converting pressures to sacks at the sixth-lowest rate after ranking eighth over the previous two seasons. It’s not possible to assume all the good things that are happening will keep happening and all the bad things will get fixed, but some of the places Kansas City has struggled are areas in which it’s likely to improve as the season progresses.
There’s a case to be made. Since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, the average 9-0 team has had a point differential of plus-122, meaning it has won its typical game by 13.6 points. The Chiefs don’t have a single win by that mark, and their plus-58 point differential is the worst for any undefeated team through nine games. They’re two points behind the aforementioned 2006 Colts, who immediately lost their 10th game of the season.
At the same time, schedule strength is a real thing, and it plays a huge role in helping teams produce undefeated stretches. The best example is the one undefeated team in league lore. The 1972 Dolphins faced one of the easiest regular-season slates in league history. After playing a Chiefs team in Week 1 that would eventually finish 8-6, Miami didn’t face another team that would finish with a winning record until Week 13, its second-to-last game of the season. Nine of its 14 games came against teams that won five games or fewer.
Pro Football Reference uses its Simple Rating System to calculate a strength of schedule for each team. The average opponent for the 1972 Dolphins was 4.3 points below league average by that system. Since then, just six teams over the ensuing 53 seasons have faced an easier schedule. Those teams, prorated to a 17-game schedule, won an average of 13 games.
Stephen A. Smith says that even though the Chiefs are undefeated, they can be had.
One of those six teams was the 1975 Vikings, who also started 9-0. Just below the Dolphins were the 2015 Panthers, who started 9-0 and finished 15-1. The average full-season strength of schedule for these teams that started 9-0 is minus-1.4, which would constitute the eighth-easiest schedule for any team in 2024.
While there are only nine games worth of data on these Chiefs, they’re facing a much tougher schedule than the typical 9-0 team played during their full regular season. With a plus-1.1 strength of schedule, the only 9-0 team to face a tougher slate across their full season was those 2006 Colts. That strength of schedule will fall as the Chiefs face easier opponents down the stretch, but they should still finish with one of the tougher schedules we’ve seen from teams that were in this position after nine games.
Have they been lucky? While I’ve pointed out the fumble luck hasn’t gone their way, they’ve had some fortunate timing and benefited from things like Isaiah Likely‘s foot and bad opposition kicking, neither of which they can control. It certainly feels like they have been less dominant than the 2007 Patriots, and that’s borne out by their point differential.
And yet, the reality is the vast majority of teams that get off to these starts catch breaks on the way. Take another team quarterbacked by a Hall of Famer that was attempting to claim a three-peat, the 1990 49ers. Joe Montana‘s team started 9-0 and finished 14-2, although they fell short of the Super Bowl when they lost to the Giants in the NFC Championship Game.
In Week 1, those 49ers won on a last-second field goal to beat the Saints after New Orleans threw deep with a chance to close out the game on third down with 1:35 to go. In Week 3, Deion Sanders dropped a pick-six that would have given the Falcons a fourth-quarter lead. The 49ers needed a 10-point comeback to beat the Oilers in Week 4. In Week 8, Montana went 4-of-16 for 31 yards in the second half as the 49ers needed another field goal with five seconds left to beat a 2-6 Browns team. After a 24-20 victory over the Packers took the 49ers to 8-0, one headline said: “It’s Not Pretty, But It’s Still the 49ers.”
Even the 2007 Patriots had their moments. They trailed 20-10 with eight minutes to go in the fourth quarter against the Colts before leading back-to-back touchdown drives to get to 9-0. When they needed another fourth-quarter comeback to beat A.J. Feeley and the Eagles as 24.5-point underdogs, The New York Times headline said: “Patriots Are Unbeaten but Don’t Look Unbeatable.” The next week, New England needed multiple controversial calls and a winning touchdown with 44 seconds left to beat a 4-7 Ravens team. The Patriots finished December with a game against the Jets that was within one score until the final few minutes, then went down 28-16 in Week 17 against a Giants team with nothing to play for before a furious comeback got them to 16-0.
I’d still say the Chiefs have been less dominant than the 2007 Patriots, of course, because we’ve rarely seen them pull away from opponents the way dominant teams usually do. But it’s also true that we have rose-colored memories of the past. Unless you’re a Ravens fan, you probably think about that Patriots team dropping 40- and 50-point games on overmatched opposition during the regular season, not their close calls. If you were lucky enough to see the 1972 Dolphins play, you probably weren’t thinking too much about their strength of schedule. If the Chiefs make a serious run at 17-0, nobody’s going to look back in two decades and say they were barely scraping by each week, even if it feels like that’s true now.
Usually, it’s running into another great team. When evaluating the 21 previous 9-0 teams since the merger, I checked each of their first losses to see how and when it happened. Two teams didn’t lose any regular-season games, so the 1972 Dolphins and 2007 Patriots are out of the discussion.
Of the remaining 19, 12 lost to a team I would characterize as a legitimate playoff contender. The 2015 Patriots started 9-0 and lost in overtime to a Broncos team that would eventually win the Super Bowl. The 2009 Saints, who would eventually win the title themselves, won their first 13 games before losing to the Cowboys, who won the NFC East with an 11-5 record and even beat the Eagles in the wild-card round.
Six slipped on a banana peel. Take the 2011 Packers, who were coming off a Super Bowl win and cruising at 13-0. They went into Kansas City as 11.5-point favorites to face a 5-8 team that had already fired coach Todd Haley and promoted Romeo Crennel to the interim job. The Chiefs were starting Kyle Orton, who had been cut by the Broncos at midseason and had thrown just one pass in a Kansas City uniform. The Chiefs hit four field goals and got a touchdown from the legendary Jackie Battle, who broke off a 15-yard run to end the game and upset the Pack.
Another team on this list is the 2009 Colts, who infamously decided to take Peyton Manning out of the game in the third quarter of a Week 16 game against the Jets with a 15-10 lead to keep their veteran fresh for the postseason. The 14-0 Colts quickly faded with Curtis Painter at quarterback, while a New York team whose coach had said the prior week that they were “out of the playoffs,” only to be informed they still had a shot at making it by winning out, promptly roared back to beat the Colts, blew out the Bengals to clinch a playoff berth and then won two playoff games before Manning got his revenge in the AFC Championship Game.
These teams usually lost because they had a game in which they suffered unrecoverable errors. They usually ran ugly turnover margins, like when those 1990 49ers turned the ball over six times in a loss to a Rams team that would finish 5-11. The 1975 Vikings missed an extra point and two field goals, including a 45-yarder at the end of regulation, in a 31-30 loss to Washington. Opponents went on second-half outbursts that our undefeateds couldn’t answer.
That kind of game could happen to the Chiefs, who have had turnover issues this season. They still have tough matchups against the Bills, Chargers, Texans and Steelers. They might be favored in each of their matchups after this weekend’s trip to Buffalo, but there’s a huge difference between being favored to win each of those games and being favored to win all of those games.
They could just as easily be upset by an also-ran. Their last loss — on Christmas last year — was to a Raiders team with Aidan O’Connell at quarterback when Vegas scored defensive touchdowns on back-to-back snaps. Those same Raiders have gone 5-9 since. Kansas City nearly lost as 7.5-point favorites at home on Sunday against the Broncos, who were coming off a 31-point loss to the Ravens in Week 9.
I don’t think so. Even by Chiefs standards, they’ve been skating through wins by razor-thin margins and relying on Mahomes to bail them out when they need big plays. Acknowledging that they always seem to find a way, that’s a dangerous thing to count on happening for an entire season. History tells us that no team, not even the Chiefs, can count on blocked field goals and catches being a half-inch out of bounds to save victories for a full season. Eventually, the team has to dominate.
If the Chiefs keep playing the way they’ve been playing, they have no shot at 17-0. I do think they could play better over the rest of the season, though, and that would make an undefeated season at least a little more plausible. If they recover more fumbles, the run game gets a boost from having Pacheco back in the lineup, Mahomes stops throwing interceptions and the defense takes a tiny step forward closer to where it was in 2023, that’s a much better version of this team.
The most likely scenario is Kansas City comes up a few wins short. Using the FPI’s win probabilities, I simulated the rest of the Chiefs’ season 10,000 times and found they were most likely to win 14 games (28.2% of simulations) or 15 games (26.3% of simulations). They had a 13% chance of going 16-1, so even my spicy take from before the season would be considered relatively unlikely.
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Those numbers are missing something, as there’s the possibility the Chiefs will let off the gas. Reid has been happy to sit his veterans in meaningless games in previous seasons. A win over the Bills would put them further ahead of the competition for the top seed in the AFC, and if the Steelers slip, they would be in an even more dominant position. If they were to get to 15-0 and clinch home-field advantage in the AFC, would Reid really play Mahomes and the rest of his stars in two meaningless games to try and put together a perfect season, knowing he would be risking a shot at the first three-peat in league history? I’m sure the Chiefs don’t want to lose before the postseason, but there’s a case to be made that it would make their lives easier as they prepare for the postseason.
Sunday will be Kansas City’s biggest test of the season. The Week 1 game against the Ravens was at home. Now, the team has to travel to Buffalo, and while it vanquished the Bills in Western New York during the 2023 playoffs, Josh Allen & Co. have beaten the Chiefs in each of the past three regular-season matchups they’ve played. It seems presumptuous to talk about an undefeated season after a team needed a blocked field goal to overcome the Broncos. Beat the Bills on Sunday, though, and 17-0 Watch will officially be on.